Entryway Hutch: Getting Started

This weekend we spent all day Saturday picking apples. It’s not exactly Autumn in Southern California but we’ll take what we can get.

We picked about 7 pounds of apples. There was a sawmill at the orchard and they has some pretty inexpensive wood, but none of it was right for anything I have on deck. Roman was worn out.

That means I wasn’t able to make as much progress as normal, but I still had fun and look forward to the next steps.

---

First, I ripped out four leg blanks; these are 8/4 square pieces that are 31” long. I used a marking gauge to match the 8/4 thickness, scratched a line on both sides, darkened it with a pencil, and then got to sawing (alternating pretty frequently.) I planed the side I was indexing on flat to make sure I had a nice clean line. Here’s what that ended up looking like:

For weird reasons I timed myself on these. The first I didn’t time, the second took 13 minutes, the third took 9m30s, and the last one took 7m45s. This was serious cardio!

Next I planed the saw marks off all four legs. Cherry is so pretty!

I plan to taper these legs after doing the joinery, so I laid out the final size of the “feet” of the legs: